Facebook has been proven time and time again to be an effective channel for driving traffic to your website, converting visitors into leads, increasing app installations, and generating more Likes for your business Page.

But using Facebook advertising to drive results like these only works if you're smart about it. The challenge for marketers is knowing how to optimise your Facebook ads to get the most bang for your buck.

What exactly does it take to make a Facebook ad successful? To find out, HubSpot teamed up with AdEspresso and analysed 100,000 Facebook ads from businesses. We compiled the data into a free visual guide,The Science of Successful Facebook Ads.

In this brand new ebook, we go through the data we collected and the analyses we drew from it, Facebook advertising best practices to follow, and examples of companies that are doing it well to get your creative juices flowing.

Facebook has agreed to acquire LiveRail, a video advertising platform, the two companies announced on Wednesday. Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.

LiveRail was founded in 2007 and helps companies ranging from Major League Baseball to DailyMotion to optimize delivery of video ads on mobile and the web through real-time bidding and its proprietary market data. The company delivers 7 billion video ads a month.

"We believe that LiveRail, Facebook and the premium publishers it serves have an opportunity to make video ads better and more relevant for the hundreds of millions of people who watch digital video every month," Brian Boland, VP of ads product marketing at Facebook, said in a statement announcing the deal. "More relevant ads will be more interesting and engaging to people watching online video, and more effective for marketers too." Read more...

Facebook will be pounding the pavement this summer in an attempt to teach its largest group of advertisers — small and medium-sized businesses — how to utilize the company's ad offerings

Facebook, along with partners like Square, Intuit QuickBooks, and LegalZoom, is planning a five-stop event tour the company calls Facebook Fit, a series of "boot camp-style events designed to help SMBs achieve business success," Facebook wrote in a blog post Tuesday

Facebook has stops planned in five major U.S. markets, and expects 500 to 700 attendees at each event, according to Dan Levy, Facebook's director of small business. The events are intended for both existing and potential advertisers, and Levy tells Mashable that the specific content may be determined by which companies sign up Read more...

Sponsored stories show when a user's Facebook friend interacts with a sponsored Page, app or event. For example, if one of your Facebook friends posted about Nike's Brand Page, and Nike chose to promote that interaction, you would see it as a Sponsored Story within your News Feed

Advertisers will be able to buy Sponsored Stories up until April 9, at which point all existing Sponsored Stories will transition into other ad formats. For example, a Sponsored Story highlighting a page Like will simply turn into a Page Like ad Read more...

Facebook's motto is "move fast and break things," but it appears the company tried to do the opposite with its latest ad product.

Facebook confirmed Tuesday that it is testing video ads this week that automatically start playing in the News Feed on desktop and mobile. The move is among the most significant of the company's many, many efforts to introduce new revenue-generating products following its IPO last year. Some analysts predict that video ads could be a billion-dollar market opportunity for Facebook, but it comes with the risk of potentially alienating users

It's a safe bet that Facebook will see even higher revenue growth in the upcoming quarter — the holidays always produce great ad revenue — but that's not the only reason to be optimistic about Facebook's future revenue stream

The social network has 1 million advertisers on its platform, a number first announced in June, and double the number of advertisers from a year before, said Dan Levy, Facebook's director of small businesses. One million advertisers is an impressive figure. Equally impressive is that Facebook has 25 million small businesses with active company pages, which means only 4% of companies that use Facebook to connect with customers are also using the site to advertise. That's a lot of potential advertising revenue sitting close at hand Read more...

Has Facebook finally succeeded in becoming a mobile-first company? That's the big question heading into the social network's third quarter earnings results Wednesday

Facebook has impressed analysts and investors in each quarter so far this year by reporting strong growth in mobile ad revenue. The company revealed that mobile ads accounted for 41% of total ad revenue in the second quarter this year, up from 30% in the first quarter and essentially nothing a year earlier. If that growth continues, Facebook could approach or even surpass the 50% mark this quarter

After studying more than 200 billion Facebook ads, it has been discovered that the ads are more effective on iOS than on Android. The study conducted by Nanigans shows that Facebook ads on iOS are 1,790% more profitable than on Android-powered devices.Nanigans is one of Facebook’s largest ad buyers specifically focusing on retail advertising. According to the company (via VentureBeat), iOS-based ads have shown a surprisingly high click through rate:

“Retailers are realizing significantly greater return from audiences on iOS than audiences on Android,” the report says. “For the first three quarters of 2013, RPC [revenue per click] on iOS averaged 6.1 times higher than Android and ROI [return on investment] on iOS averaged 17.9 times higher than Android.”

“Audiences cost more on iPhone, and the reason is that it’s worth it,” Slagen said. “Typically, we’re not looking to acquire one-time customers, we’re looking to invest over time … so we pay more up front for better long-term results.” Read more...

Facebook ad buyers have cause to celebrate: On Tuesday, the social network unveiled a major overhaul of both its basic ad-buying platform, Ads Manager, and its more sophisticated offering, Power Editor, both of which now boast a more streamlined interface.

Those who have used Ads Manager and Power Editor in the past know that neither tool is the simplest or most logically designed. Previously, ad buyers were asked to choose from a range of ad options and then select their campaign objectives and optimization methods.

Now, more reasonably, advertisers are first asked to identify their objectives. That could be a sales conversion on a website, for example, or an increase in mobile app downloads. Other objectives include increasing total page Likes, increasing engagement with particular posts or a Facebook app, boosting in-store Offer claims and upping RSVPs to a Facebook event. Read more...

Two online dating ads featured on Facebook this week included photos of a teenager who committed suicide

The social network has since apologized for the ads, which promoted a Canadian online-dating site by including images of Rehtaeh Parsons. Parsons, 17, hanged herself in April after pictures showing her alleged rape circulated online

In its apology, Facebook called the ads' inclusion of the photos "a gross violation of our ad policies." A company spokesperson released the following statement:

"This is an extremely unfortunate example of an advertiser scraping an image from the Internet and using it in their ad campaign. This is a gross violation of our ad policies and we have removed the ad and permanently deleted the advertiser's account. We apologize for any harm this has caused." Read more...